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July222010

19:47

“Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury
itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about
it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the
second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about
nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't
deserve space in my head.”

April172010

01:35

“Simplifying the interface of the [Bloomberg] terminal would not be accepted by most users because they take pride on manipulating its current "complex" interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.”

March022010

December102009

05:25

“Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards. ... [T]he children who suffer most from bad environments also profit the most from good ones.”

May222009

May212009

23:10

“We can be happy experiencing the passive
pleasure of a rested body, warm sunshine, or the contentment of a serene
relationship, but this kind of happiness is dependent on favorable
external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of our own
making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in
consciousness.”

April142009

In this post, one author proposes that people disclose the signals they're trying to implicitly send, and the hidden agendas they might have when writing articles. He proceeds to lead by example, revealing a long list of motivations behind his previous posts: That post that on its surface was about how it's okay to be irrational sometimes, which used donation habits as an example? It's meant to signal his altruism and support the charities he mentions, of course. Two others: Meant to signal how much of an academic he is by quoting from research papers.

My first reaction after reading his list and others people post in the comments: Wow, I feel a bit cheated, and I've lost some respect for those people.It's like they don't actually care about rationality all that much, they're driven by the same monkey tribe behavior as, say, people who flaunt brandseveryone else... got to impress your peers in order to be accepted and respected. It's just that for whatever reasons they chose this little subculture and its value system as their own.

But wait – first of all those mostly weren't the main reasons for his posts, just minor factors... and kudos for being so open and self-analytical, right? (It's meant to signal honesty, obviously).

Another statement from the comments that rings true: Asking "what are you signaling?" is like asking "what is your greatest
weakness?" during a job interview. It handicaps honest people.

And of course I'm posting this on a tumblelog in no small part meant to signal what a wide array of cool interests I have...

February142009

21:41

“Then he switches on the machine. He is trying to suppress those parts
of my brain responsible for thinking contextually, for making
connections. Without them, I will be able to see things more as an
autistic might: [...] "you start seeing what's actually there, not what you think is there."”

January112009

December172008

20:41

“Set more reasonable goals and recognize that achieving even modest change will be difficult. [...]Remember that your openness to new experiences is slowly declining, so you are better off making a new start today than postponing it until later.”

October232008

19:48

“Humans who behave purely rationally are brain-damaged. Patients who have suffered injury to the areas in the brain that control emotion, but who retain their intellectual abilities, end up acting in socially aberrant ways. ...

Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out as interdependent, bonded, and unequal.”

September302008

12:26

“One of the failure modes I've come to better understand in myself
since observing it in others, is what I call, "living in the
should-universe". The universe where everything works the way it
common-sensically ought to, as opposed to the actual is-universe we
live in. There's more than one way to live in the should-universe, and
outright delusional optimism is only the least subtle.”

August282008

00:14

“Once you draw a boundary around a group, the mind starts trying to harvest similarities from the group. And unfortunately the human pattern-detectors seem to operate in such overdrive that we see patterns whether they're there or not; a weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory.”